When ‘Garfield Minus Garfield’ Subtracted the Strip’s Title Character

It was sometime around 2006 that Dan Walsh noticed something. Garfield was better without Garfield.

Walsh, a resident of Dublin, Ireland, had seen various iterations of the comic strip online without its familiar orange cat. It got Walsh thinking: Without Garfield’s sardonic observations, it seemed as though his owner, Jon Arbuckle, was suffering from an existential crisis.

“Life … this is it,” Jon observes in one strip. “This is all there is.” By the third panel, he simply looks off into the distance. In another, Jon exclaims that “There’s something wrong with my pants.” No further explanation is given.

Walsh titled the edited strips Garfield Minus Garfield, posted them on his Tumblr blog, and watched as the views grew—up to 300,000 hits a day. Clearly, Jon’s manic state resonated with people. But a larger question loomed: How would Garfield creator Jim Davis feel about this new and unauthorized iteration of his cat?

1. Agent Orange
2. Addition by Subtraction

Agent Orange

Ironically, Davis originally intended for Garfield to be all about Jon. “I ran some early ideas at a local paper to see how I felt about it and I called the strip Jon,” Davis told Mental Floss in 2014. “It was about him, but he had this wise cat who, every time, came back zinging him. He always had the great payoff.”

Davis was soon convinced that since the cat had all the good lines, he was really the star. Garfield—named after Davis’s grandfather, who was in turn named after President James Garfield—debuted in 1978 and swiftly became a pop culture touchstone. Books collecting the daily and Sunday strips were bestsellers; an animated show took off; Garfield merchandise reaped millions for Davis, who soon opened a new umbrella, Paws, Inc., to handle the licensing deals. Even if one didn’t particularly like Garfield, it was impossible not to be familiar with the beats: The cat loved lasagna, hated Mondays, and burned as few calories as possible.

The strip’s homogenized humor was eventually noticed by a postmodern internet culture. On sites like Tumblr, strips were reworked to seem darker or sinister. Walsh, a then-33-year-old musician and IT worker in Ireland, took note. He began deleting Garfield from the panels, which transformed Jon from a hapless cat owner to a tragic archetype.

“I was astonished at how horrifically dark they could be,” Walsh told Cracked in 2023. “It suddenly became a very depressing strip about a very depressed man. The example I always use is one with Jon saying, ‘I’m so depressed it’s depressing.’ Then, in the second panel, he actually said this in a children’s comic: ‘I’m going to go outside and shoot myself.’ The third panel obviously had Garfield say something to take the edge off, but in Garfield Minus Garfield, that panel was empty.”

Changing the meaning of a comic strip was not particularly new, though the best-known example was accidental. In 1981, The Dayton Daily News managed to mix up the captions for the family-friendly Dennis the Menace and the morbid The Far Side. For the latter, a family of snakes were supposed to be at dinner, with one exclaiming, “Oh brother … not hamsters again!” The caption wound up under a drawing of Dennis munching on a sandwich. (The paper did it a second time two years later, with Dennis exclaiming “I see your little, petrified skull … resting on a shelf somewhere”; The Far Side featured a cavewoman psychic.)

As Campbell’s Soup was to Andy Warhol, Garfield was to Walsh. He began posting Garfield Minus Garfield in February 2008. The strip was minimalist to the extreme, often involving Jon addressing an empty panel. Stripped of context or other characters (Garfield, Odie, Nermal), he appeared to be suffering from some unknown psychological malady.

In one early strip, Jon says nothing for two panels before screaming, “The pain!” In another, he asks “What is my purpose in life?” before shoving an ice cream cone in his own face.

There was a stategy to Walsh’s selections. He could not, for example, use strips where Jon is talking with women he was dating, since Jon’s facial expressions were more upbeat. “If Jon is happy,” Walsh said in 2008, “my strips don’t work.”

Walsh’s reimagining of Garfield took off thanks to aggregation sites like Digg and StumbleUpon. He was soon getting attention from TIME, The Washington Post, and The New Yorker. Walsh said he was told the page was the most popular on Tumblr at the time. There was something resonant about stripping a cartoon of its most identifiable and most lucrative presence, revealing a kind of pathos in Jon.

But Walsh had a lingering problem. Garfield was the property of Jim Davis, and one worth hundreds of millions of dollars. While some intellectual property holders may encourage fan art, this was a repurposing of the actual strips. While it was funny, it was also leaving Walsh wide open for legal retaliation.

Addition by Subtraction

Walsh was so paranoid about possible legal consequences that he tried to remain anonymous. Eventually, his name was divulged by a reporter. He no longer had the protection of an obscure internet identity.

But Davis had a sense of humor about it. In June 2008, while Garfield Minus Garfield was taking off, Davis told The New York Times that the unauthorized version was “fascinating” and that “some of them really work.”

There was better news. Davis, via Paws, Inc., extended an offer for Walsh to continue working on his stripped-down Garfield online provided Paws, Inc. could assemble a book collection of the strips paired next to the originals. Walsh agreed and even wrote the introduction to the book, which was released in October 2008 as part of a promotional push for the character’s 30th anniversary.

It was a strange bit of reverse-inspiration, but it wasn’t the only one. Soon, a plethora of surreal Garfield riffs emerged. Pipe Garfield ended with the character smoking a pipe; Garfield Thrown Out a Window ended with the cat being tossed through glass. Lasagna Cat was a live-action web series in which strips were recreated. There’s even a subreddit, r/imsorryjon, devoted to dire depictions of the character.

Walsh told Cracked he slowed down some beginning in 2014, when he became a father. But Garfield Minus Garfield persists. Every so often, Walsh will post a new bout of Jon’s existential torment on his site.  

In at least one way, Walsh’s work may have helped Jon find a degree of inner peace. Shortly after Garfield Minus Garfield debuted, Davis decided Jon needed a girlfriend. “How much humor can you get out of someone’s unhappiness?” Davis said in 2008. “Day after day for so many years—it was getting to me, too.”

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